Reach for the Skies

by Richard Branson

  Frank Whittle with his turbojet: it earned him almost nothing.

  Whittle was a fearless aerobatic flier and was selected to perform the “crazy flying” routine in the 1930 Royal Air Force air display at RAF Hendon. During rehearsal, he wrote off two planes. Flight Lieutenant Harold Raeburn was not impressed. Whittle recalled, “As I came up to him he stood there with his face flushed with rage and said furiously ‘Why don’t you take all my bloody aeroplanes, make a heap of them in the middle of the aerodrome and set fire to them—it’s quicker!’”

  That year, Whittle took out his first patent. By April 1937, he had his first jet engine running: a liquid-fueled monster that kept on accelerating even after he’d switched the fuel tap off! One visiting RAF officer described the contraption as “pure, unadulterated Heath Robinson.”

  The Air Ministry decided not to develop Whittle’s jet engine. You can understand their point of view: back then, operating Whittle’s engine at full throttle would have melted it into a heap of steaming slag. It needed to be built of materials that wouldn’t be available for years. In the meantime, the RAF put Whittle through Cambridge and funded his postgraduate studies, in the hope that, once materials were available, they could put him to work.

  The trouble for Whittle really began in 1942, when the Ministry of Aircraft Production began to take a serious interest in his invention. Desperate to develop jet-powered warplanes in the shortest possible time, MAP gave Whittle’s company Power Jets no time to work on proper prototypes. Drawing-board designs went straight from Power Jets to Rolls-Royce, who quickly discovered—to no one’s very great surprise—that these untested engines worked very poorly. Presented with a dud and with a contract of their own to fulfill, Rolls-Royce engineers went ahead and reengineered Whittle’s design. Their work was brilliant—but it flew in the face of Frank Whittle’s proprietary rights to his own engine.

  MAP’s complete disregard for the way business is properly conducted left both Rolls-Royce and Power Jets fighting wasteful and unwinnable arguments about who owned what and who had done what to which part of whose engine. Those arguments soon became so inextricably knotted, MAP decided there was only one thing it could do: it cut Power Jets out of the equation. In 1944, Stafford Cripps nationalized Whittle’s company. It was a decision as easy to accomplish as it was cruel to contemplate. For all its work, Power Jets had very little it could call its own. It had been using government facilities for years. Now it was forced into becoming a research-and-development vehicle for the government’s National Gas Turbine Establishment.

  Was taking Whittle’s company away from him a rotten thing to do? I think so. Cripps was an enemy of free enterprise and a great believer in central planning—over the coming years, his policies would virtually destroy British manufacturing. Whittle’s longtime supporter and fellow director Rolf Dudley-Williams had no time for Cripps at all: “I wanted to wipe the floor with him,” he wrote. “Unfortunately he died and had himself cremated, so I couldn’t even piss on his grave.”

  In 1941, American research programs were very close to developing the jet. They lagged behind the British, and in peacetime that advantage might have had commercial meaning. But there was a war on: Whittle himself flew to the United States to accelerate the American jet effort, and, in the same year, Britain gave its jet technology to General Electric for free.

  Much is made of how this gift lost Britain its lead over America in the jet business. But this is gloominess for gloominess’s sake. Today Rolls-Royce is the second-largest aircraft-engine maker in the world, behind GE Aviation. Its annual revenue in 2008 was more than £9 billion ($16.5 billion). Britain’s biggest aircraft manufacturer, the once-nationalized British Aerospace, now BAE systems, is the world’s second-largest defense contractor and the largest in Europe, not to mention becoming, in 2009, the biggest-ever target of a British Serious Fraud Office investigation—a distinction it could probably have done without!

  Britain doesn’t do at all badly in the world aviation business; but ever since the end of the war, it’s been haunted with visions of what might have been. It’s been haunted, in other words, by the Comet.

  The de Havilland Comet was Britain’s groundbreaking passenger aircraft. It was the world’s first passenger jet with a pressurized cabin, and this enabled it to fly higher, farther, faster, and more smoothly than any other passenger plane. It was quiet and reasonably spacious (there was a bar). Best of all, flying at 35,000 feet, the Comet was above the weather—weather its propeller-driven competitors had to slog through. On board the Comet, air travel became, for the first time, a relaxing experience. Television reporters covering the maiden flights invariably took shots of a pencil balancing on the end of a dining tray.

  The Comet could carry only 70 passengers and could never have hoped to compete with the later big American airliners like the Boeing 707. But what did that matter? It was half as fast again as its rival, the Douglas DC-6, and was well on its way to becoming a staple small liner for the world’s rapidly expanding civilian airlines. The Comet was a hugely popular machine, loved by flight and cabin crew, trusted by passengers.

  BOAC Flight 781 was the first to break up; minutes after it took off from Rome’s Ciampino airport, its scattered wreckage plummeted into the Mediterranean. This was on January 10, 1954. Three months later, a South African Airways Comet crashed into the sea near Naples. All Comets were grounded while a public inquiry looked for the cause of the accidents.

  Many accounts will tell you that there was a fatal flaw in the Comet’s design; actually, there wasn’t. We’re told that the square windows were the wrong shape to cope with the pressure differential at 35,000 feet; in truth, there was nothing wrong with them. What happened was this: the window frames were supposed to be glued and heat-sealed to the airframe using a patented British process called Redux. One of the supervising engineers, worried that Redux would not be enough to seal such a complex shape, ordered the frames to be riveted as well, just to make sure. Even the tiniest fatigue crack around an uneven rivet was enough to fracture the cabin’s skin: explosive decompression and a catastrophic failure of the airframe followed in seconds.

  Painstaking reconstruction of a crashed aircraft revealed the Comet’s fatal weakness.

  Had the error shown up early enough, it could have been corrected. Had it shown up early, it wouldn’t even have been considered an error: just a routine wrong turn on the road researching and developing a new airplane. But no test, however meticulous, can predict the future. De Havilland’s testing regime had been the most rigorous ever for a civilian plane—and there had been no hint of trouble.

  De Havilland didn’t give up without a fight. They redesigned the Comet’s windows and produced the Comet 2. And in 1958, they came out with the Comet 4, a magnificent passenger jet, and the first to enter British transatlantic service. But while de Havilland’s planes languished on the ground, the U.S. companies Boeing and Douglas had been learning valuable lessons from the company’s misfortune.

  Independently, and driven by a furious rivalry, they together evolved a new generation of airliner. Douglas’s DC-8 was both faster than the Comet 4 and cheaper to operate. The Comet’s demise left Britain lagging behind in air construction. There was one ray of hope. Engineers at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) working on the Avro Vulcan strategic bomber had studied German research into high-speed aircraft and now knew more about supersonic wing design than anyone on earth. With that knowledge, they might yet leapfrog Boeing and Douglas and produce the world’s first supersonic passenger plane!

  The speed of sound, or Mach 1, is not a constant; it varies with temperature. It is about 760 miles per hour on a standard day (59 degrees F), but at 60,000 feet it drops to about 660 miles per hour.

  The Second World War saw the speeds of fighter aircraft increase exponentially, and some, such as the Lockheed P-38 Lightning and the Republic P-47, begin to experience problems with “compressibility.” Basically, when diving at full power and high alt
itude, such powerful fighters approached their limiting Mach numbers and went out of control. Of course, as the aircraft descended into warmer air, the speed of sound increased and control was restored, although this was often too late. Consequently many pilots were killed, as they could not bail out or pull out of the dive.

  The two aircraft were very different machines. The Lightning was a twin-engine aircraft powered by two liquid-cooled Allison V-12 engines. At high speeds the aircraft would shake violently and then pitch down into an increasingly steep dive. Recovery was extremely difficult and sometimes impossible. The P-47’s problem was easier to understand. The largest and most powerful single-piston engine fighter ever made, it weighed almost 8,000 kilograms (3,636 pounds) and was fitted with a massive Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engine. This produced more than 2,500 horsepower, and the combination of tremendous weight and great power meant that full-power dives could quickly put the aircraft into compressibility. This killed many pilots.

  Sound moves the air, and, as mentioned above, its speed is called Mach 1. Hit the air above this speed and it doesn’t have time to get out of your way. It explodes. Many objects exceed the speed of sound: the leading edges of flags, the tips of bullwhips (the “crack” of a whip is a tiny sonic boom), the tails of maliciously flicked bath towels—and, sometimes, the tips of propellers. If your blades are long enough and spin fast enough, the tips exceed the speed of sound. When this happens, the air that would normally be fanned behind the blade, producing forward motion, simply explodes, constantly, producing a standing wave—a shock wave—that generates turbulence just forward of the blade. It’s not as serious as it sounds: you’ll stay aloft well enough. But you won’t go any faster, and your fuel consumption will deteriorate.

  It was these various, unconnected technical troubles met by aircraft (both jet- and propeller-driven) not designed for supersonic flight that led to the idea of a “sound barrier.” It was real enough, but it was a technical barrier, not a physical one, and has long been superseded. These days most supersonic craft reach multiples of the speed of sound with no abrupt transitions at all.

  Supersonic flight is different from subsonic flight, in some curious and fascinating ways. At supersonic speeds, aircraft get hot: parts of the U.S. Air Force’s experimental X-15 spaceplane reached a highly significant-sounding 666 degrees centigrade! This is because the air doesn’t have time to get out of the way of the aircraft. It piles up. Flying through this stuff is like flying through jelly. Neil Armstrong found this out the hard way on April 20, 1962, flying an X-15 spaceplane out of Edwards Air Force Base in California. Armstrong flew to a height of 39 miles (the highest he flew before Gemini 8, and nearly two thirds the distance covered by Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne). During his descent, though, he held the aircraft nose up a fraction too high and ricocheted off the atmosphere. Eighteen miles too high, traveling at three times the speed of sound, Armstrong overshot the runway at Edwards by 42 miles.

  An X-15 generates cone-shaped shock waves in this supersonic flight test.

  The “Caspian Sea Monster”

  Look out over any decent-size body of water and you are bound, eventually, to see a bird skimming its surface. The bird will be moving very quickly, because it is exploiting an aviation possibility that we humans have barely begun to explore.

  The wing tips of both birds and airplanes generate considerable turbulence. Fly close to the ground, however, and air displaced by the wings cannot freely wheel and spread: the ground is in the way. Instead, this wind forms a high-pressure cushion upon which the bird or plane can surf. The result is an incredibly quick and energy-efficient flight—provided you don’t mind flying just a few feet off the ground.

  During the cold war, U.S. satellite pictures of the Caspian Sea revealed a disturbing object: it was huge, it was fast, and it made no sense. It looked like a derelict airplane: a gigantic fuselage fused to stubby, chopped-off wings. It wasn’t a boat and it wasn’t a plane: what the devil was it? At a loss, the Western intelligence community dubbed it the “Sea Monster.”

  The ekranoplan was conceived by revolutionary Soviet engineer Rostislav Alexeyev. And, contrary to the impression created by decades of Western propaganda, it was one of the Russian military’s great technological success stories. Ekranoplans were plying the Caspian Sea for years, in full view of a baffled NATO, carrying military matériel from one side of the sea to the other, far faster and more cheaply than any plane could. The Sea Monster that so intrigued and worried the Western intelligence community was the KM—the grandest product of Soviet ekranoplan development. It was more than 328 feet long, weighed 531 tons fully loaded, and could travel at just a shade under 250 miles per hour, mere feet above the surface of the water.

  A baroque curiosity of the cold war? Certainly: development of the ekranoplan idea was abandoned for years following the breakup of the Soviet Union. But good ideas linger, and the grandest ekranoplans of all are even now taking shape on the drawing boards of American and Russian companies.

  Boeing has been developing the Pelican, a turbopropdriven military transport with a 500-foot wingspan. They are designing it to carry 1,300 tons of cargo up to 10,000 nautical miles—at an altitude of 20 feet. Meanwhile, at the Beriev Aircraft Company of Russia, plans are afoot to build the largest aircraft in the world. The Be-2500 Neptun is a superheavy amphibian cargo-aircraft concept. Its maximum takeoff weight will be 2,750 tons. It will function as both a conventional high-altitude jet and an ekranoplan, and it will fly transcontinental routes, taking off from conventional seaports and requiring no special infrastructure.

  Will it ever fly? If it does, remember to duck!

  Because of all this air piling up in front of them, planes traveling at supersonic speeds run into problems similar to those faced by seagoing vessels. Waves of thick air, called shock waves, cling to a supersonic craft the way a bow wave sticks to the front of a boat. (Bow waves are shock waves, but waves in water move so slowly, it’s relatively easy for a boat to throw up a shock wave in front of itself.) As early as 1933, wind-tunnel tests had shown German researchers that as air gathers in front of a plane traveling at supersonic speed, its shock wave spreads behind it as a cone. A plane’s wings have to stay inside the cone or the shock wave will put such pressure on the control surfaces that they can’t be operated.

  This is a problem for designers. If the plane’s wings are too long, they’ll cease to work at supersonic speeds and the plane will crash. If they’re too short, however, the plane might not be able to get off the ground at all! Designing a wing that will function at subsonic and supersonic speeds is no easy task, but work on the problem had begun long before supersonic planes were ever built.

  It was by a quite unpleasant circumstance that Dietrich Küchemann, a Göttingen native, found himself developing ideas of supersonic flight. He had been planning to study pure physics at the university under the celebrated mathematician Max Born—a family friend and one of the founders of quantum mechanics. When Born, a Jew, was expelled from the university under pressure from the Nazi regime, Küchemann was left casting around for other things to study.

  Göttingen was home to Germany’s largest institute of aerodynamics. There, Küchemann—somewhat to his own surprise—stumbled upon his life’s work: aerodynamics. During the war, Küchemann designed the intakes for Germany’s earliest jet fighters. It was important work, but it still left him time to develop ideas of his own, about wave drag, wingless planes, and supersonic flight. Following the German defeat, Küchemann was picked up by Operation Surgeon, a no-nonsense British program that removed German scientists and technicians out from under the noses of the occupying Russians “whether they liked it or not.”

  Küchemann, far from putting up any resistance, thrived in England. He had little cause for homesickness. At RAE Farnborough, he found himself among men like Karl Doetsch and Adolf Busemann—both, like Küchemann, pioneers of supersonic flight. By the late 1940s, the aerodynamics department of the RAE read like a Who’s Who of G
erman aeronautical design!

  The primary purpose of the RAE was to research and develop new types of aircraft for the British government. What kind of aircraft would the postwar future demand? British airplane manufacturers and the RAE responded with three truly terrifying warplanes: the Handley Page Victor, the Vickers Valiant, and the Avro Vulcan. Collectively known as the V-bombers, these planes were Britain’s core cold war deterrent until submarines equipped with the Polaris missiles came into service in 1969.

  Even as V-bomber blueprints were being pored over at the RAE, it was becoming clear that unmanned missiles would one day do the job of manned bombers. The minister of defense, Duncan Sandys, went so far as to predict the end of manned military aircraft in his lifetime.

  Engineers at the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) disagreed and responded with the TSR-2, a strike aircraft featuring an extremely fancy ground-following terrain radar, infrared cameras, side-looking radar, and a sophisticated autopilot—features that had yet to be realized on any other military aircraft. When the TSR-2 was canceled, it robbed Britain of the most advanced military plane of its day.

  The Concorde’s engines and wing shape owed much to the Avro Vulcan nuclear bomber.

  The RAE, meanwhile, had moved on to a string of rocket projects, every one of which—Black Arrow, Black Knight, Jaguar, Skylark—bit the dust. The RAE even tackled space-satellite design, with some success, but couldn’t secure government backing to see their projects through to commercial launch. For Küchemann and his colleagues, fresh from the V-bomber projects, this was a time to regroup and rethink.